GIGANTIC LAND-LIZARD FROM AUSTRALIA. 
1041 
I was favoured by receiving from George Fred. Bennett, Esq., Corr. Member 
of the Zoological Society of London, a letter of November 27th, 1879, in which he 
writes :—“ You will be pleased to hear of a new discovery which my father received 
on November 16th. I got it in King’s Creek, part of Clifton Bun, of which my 
father speaks in a letter to me, as follows :—‘ On examining the fossil skull you sent I 
considered it Beptilian, and at first sight to be a Turtle; but on further inspection 
there are some points which are against that opinion. There is, at present, some 
difficulty in solving the question. Therefore, try to get, if possible, the lower jaw and 
other portions of the animal, so that it may be as perfect as possible to make a drawing 
or cast of it before sending it to Professor Owen.’” 
In reference to the parts which I have received, Mr. G. F. Bennett writes :—“ The 
whole lot was got in such a mixed way that it is hard to divide them. The letters R 
for £ Reptilian ’ and d for ‘ Diprotodon,’ in the sketch, will give you an idea of it. 
They were excavated in a very hard red drift and had to be dug out with a pick : 
close to them was a very large jaw of Diprotodon. It is my intention to work out 
the whole of this bank. The horns were apparently in front as if they were originally 
in front of the eyes, but came away when digging ; but I found they were not joined 
together to the other part of the skull.” 
In a letter from the father, my old and esteemed friend Dr. George Bennett, 
F.L.S., of December 20th, 1879, he announced the transmission of this collection, and 
inclosed photographs of ten of the larger portions of the supposed Beptilian skull. 
They included unquestionable horn-cores and the fore part of an upper jaw, showing 
no trace of teeth or sockets on the alveolar border. Such correlation of horns with 
edentulous premaxillaries might well suggest the co-existence of a large herbivorous 
Mammal, which, if Marsupial, would be much nearer akin to the placental Ruminants 
than are the Kangaroos. But the edentulous border showed unequivocal evidences of 
having been encased, like that of a Chelonian, with horn, as my friend at first sight 
s urmised : yet in a fashion more like that of the terrestrial plant-eating Tortoises'"' than 
of the fucivorous Turtles.! 
On restoring the cranium as far as its transmitted fragments could be correctly 
juxtaposed, it manifested, in one part, not only a well-defined surface from which an 
apparently autogenous horn-core, as in the Giraffe, had become detached, but also 
pairs of exogenous ones like those of the Ox. The longest of these extended from 
the upper and side borders of the hinder portion of the cranial specimen, but evidently 
anterior, as in the Bison, to the occipital ridge. The surface, seemingly, for the sutural 
attachment of a horn-core was on the upper part of the nasal bone, symmetrical in 
shape, crossing the mid-line like the horn of a Rhinoceros. 
The breadth of this many-liorned skull from tip to tip of the pair of horn-cores 
(Plate 37, fig. 1 , b, b') is I foot lO-g inches : the length of the recomposed extent, 
* Cuvier, ‘ Ossemens Fossiles,’ 4to., tom. v, pt. 2, plate 11, fig. 19, a , b . 
t Tom . cit ., plate 11, fig. 3, e , e . 
MDCCCLXXX. 6 S 
